The downtown St. Louis area is projected to grow even further with the expansion of Square, Inc. The San Francisco-based mobile payment processing company has announced plans to move from its current space in the Cortex Innovation District to the 900 North Tucker building, long-time home to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Square has signed a 15-year lease for over 95% of the 235,000-square-foot building, a space large enough to hold at least 1,400 employees. The company’s plan is to move all of their employees from the Cortex site, which currently houses approximately 500 people, to the downtown building within the next few years.
Building and investing in St. Louis
“St. Louis is full of talent and economic opportunity, so it should come as no surprise that we’re continuing to grow in our hometown,” said Square co- founder Jim McKelvey in a statement to the press. McKelvey founded Square in 2009 with fellow St. Louis native Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder and CEO.
A majority of Square’s local employees are within the customer support or compliance or other back office-type positions. Dorsey and McKelvey’s goal is to bring more tech, software engineers, and creatives into the site. They had relocated to San Francisco in 2009 because they weren’t able to find enough tech talent to scale up the business here. Today, Square, Inc. has become one of the leaders in financial services technology, including merchant services, mobile financial services, and mobile payments.
Late last year, Dorsey and McKelvey announced plans to add over 300 more employees to the St. Louis office.
“St. Louis has always been part of our story,” Dorsey said to St. Louis Magazine in 2018. “We opened some job applications for engineers. We intend to build engineering capacity in a big way here in St. Louis, and we’re going to be very aggressive about that…. We’re going to be building in St. Louis and investing in St. Louis for the foreseeable future, so it’s important that we’re here and that we’re present.”
More businesses moving downtown
Square isn’t the only business that has decided to set up shop downtown. Other companies that have made the move include startups like SwipeSum and Label Insight and established firms such as Momentum and Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith. Nitrous Effect recently signed a deal for 35,000-sq-ft space in the St. Louis Place building and Build-A-Bear is moving its global headquarters to 415 South 18th Street.
All this has resulted in the Downtown area seeing its lowest vacancy rate in 15 years, according to the St. Louis Business Journal, and augurs a bright future ahead for downtown as well as the rest of the region.
Mayor Lydia Krewson feels that “the strength of the region” is tied to the strength of downtown, stating “I do absolutely believe that the core of the region is downtown St. Louis.”
Invest in downtown St. Louis real estate
Call us, the Cardinal Realty Group, at 1.636.225.0385 or send an email to Hal(at)CardinalRealtyGroup(dotted)com for more information on real estate in downtown St. Louis.